Hello to all on the forum . . . I have a very basic question which, hopefully, I will receive a simple answer. First of all, I'm not an overclocker, but one who's built PC's since the early '80s, and use them primarily for business use and making my living - thus, the PC needs to be absolutely stable and reliable. I've been using an old Intel D815EPEA2 PIII-based motherboard as my back-up business PC, and need to upgrade due to CPU and memory requirements (the D815EPEA2 has only a 1GHZ PIII and a paltry 512MB maximum limit).
Last week I purchased a 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0 board from Newegg for a cost-effective upgrade, especially since I can use some of my existing components. I'm using E2200 CPU with 2G's of DDR2-533 memory. Yes, I know this is certainly not a performance configuration!
Here's the question: I know what FSB means, and its relationship with the CPU speed and CPU multiplier. However, from reading most of the posts here, it appears the true FSB speed of this board is only 200MHz, as the multiplier for the E2200 is 11X. My old Intel D815EPEA2 motherboard has a FSB of 133MHz. Except for the obvious increased computational power of the E2200, and the additional memory, the 4CoreDual-SATA2 really doesn't seem to offer a significant FSB speed/bandwidth increase. Am I missing something here?
As to comparisons, are there other LGA775 boards from ASUS, Gigabyte, Intel, etc. priced in the $130 or less range that offer a higher FSB that I may use with the E2200, and hence with a lower CPU multiplier for improved performance? I almost returned the 4CoreDual-SATA2 to Newegg last week, but decided to give it a try. It's stable on all of the default settings, and works well, but I'm just a bit dismayed at the FSB speed as compared to the old Intel board. Any suggestions?
I apologize in advance for such a basic question. Thanks.